The Concept of Nature
Alfred North Whitehead's The Concept of Nature dismantles the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter by redefining nature as a unified eventful continuum, where events—temporal-spatial happenings like a thunderclap—are primary, and objects (e.g., trees, electrons) are recurrent patterns abstracted from events’ passage of nature. He critiques the bifurcation of nature—the false division between perceived qualities (colors) and scientific quantities (wavelengths)—arguing that nature is a percipient event unified through situations (contextual relational wholes). Whitehead’s uniformity of nature rejects mechanistic determinism, proposing instead a dynamic ingression of eternal objects (timeless potentials, like geometric forms) into events, shaping their relational structure. His method of extensive abstraction defines points, lines, and instants as logical derivatives of overlapping events, while theory of objects distinguishes sense-objects (directly perceived) from physical objects (inferred via causal efficacy). This work laid groundwork for process philosophy, influenced ecological ontology, and prefigured Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, remaining pivotal in debates about nature’s relational ontology and science’s metaphysical assumptions.
